General gaming discussion

Yeah I posted the vid over on the News thread.

"Screwed" is maybe a bit over dramatic, but the points she raises about why are pretty bang on. All comes down to the games industry not hitting the projected growth (which was really based off some runaway successes and companies promising their investors that their new game would have similar success, mobile gaming and then Covid) and essentially stagnating in terms of growth or even dropping compared to social media, and so investors are throwing their money behind the likes of AI instead. And ultimately the games industry is trying to appeal to and appease shareholders/investor, not the consumers.

Why is her arse going 3 feet into the air during the crawling section. I hope this wasn't mocapped or else there's probably footage of a director shouting "I NEED THAT ARSE HIGHER IN THE AIR!".

Dino CrisAss

Since the Oblivion hype I've finally been getting into Daggerfall, through the unity version. It's basically a Theseus ship of a rebuild of the original as they did the whole thing over again in Unity but from what I see largely kept it faithful. There's options to make certain things easier, or keep it 'pure' to the frustrating madness of the original like keeping its massive dungeons with their needle-in-a-haystack design (I've opted for the madness). The biggest difference to me, comparing with the DOSBOX version, is that moving a mouse doesn't make me want to vomit and the framerate is 144fps

The best way to describe it is an incredibly in-depth character creator with a procedurally generated world wrapped around it. It's sort of underwhelming at first but oddly gets very immersive once you lock into what its world is doing, the scale of it. Even the mundanity of it and the idea that it's largely populated by people and places which aren't important in the video-game sense of the word. The 'negative space' provided by the proc-gen towns and cities creates a different kind of immersion that can't be reproduced by a meticulously authored town.

There's not a quest lying behind every door, well some of them do have quests that are proc-gened for you. But largely it's just a world, you can ask these people for directions or the latest gossip on realm developments, but it doesn't have that theme park feel of Oblivion onwards that is fun in the moment but makes the place feel a bit frivolous and overly player-centric. It's more of an RPG framework, with the world and its quests providing a series of obstacles and progression opportunities, ranking up in factions is really important here cause you really want to be able to craft spells or potions or whatever.

What I do miss tho are the stories that games like Oblivion have, you have to create your own a bit. Which I don't mind, there's a flexibility to that that you don't get with heavily authored approaches. But I feel like a great TESVI would try to strike a balance between this type of design and something like Oblivion. Morrowind comes to mind as well, what that game would be like with the sense of scale that Daggerfall has.

Anyway, I'm making my case here for playing old games if the cost of buying new ones has you down. This is nowhere near as good as Morrowind, maybe the best game I've ever played, but it is my current obsession all the same.

I'm not sure what freebasing means in that context but I'm sorta doing 80:20 in favour of side missions, cause the factions rank up is really useful. Also given that the game is level scaled, which makes more sense here than in Oblivion, it feels like you'd miss a lot of stuff by just doing main story.

The exploration isn't really there, it's basically just fast travel. You can go out into the world if you want but it will take literal days to reach certain settlements. There is a mod out there which fills out the world with more unique and consequential discoveries, and adds foliage and things and enhances the FT system to be a bit like Baldur's Gate where you can get caught out and attacked on the way, requiring you to make itineraries and stop over in certain towns. Which sounds really cool, but I want to keep my Theseus Ship as close to vanilla as possible for the initial playthrough so I can appreciate all the mods later on

The exploring in dungeons can be rough, cause they are so huge and you can spend hours in them. But it is also sort of the gameplay of Daggerfall, leveling your character to handle these dungeons and completing them before the timer to turn them in expires. Which is why I didn't want to use small dungeons cause it would neuter the decision making a bit imo

The recall spell is invaluable, as is a high speed stat to zoom through them. Early on I did a lot of running away from skeletons, so levitate is also nice to take shortcuts until I leveled blunt skill to smash them

Told you so.

Too soon? 🫢